So when Houston writes, Another potential
solution is personalisation-ad targeting based on
data profiling-but that raises the concern that
advertisers and publishers are overstepping the mark
when it comes to targeting promotions using personal
data. Anyone that has visited a website only to be
mercilessly stalked by its ads for the remainder of
their onward journey across the web understands how
creepy that can be, he’s half right. But creepy
targeting doesn't just fail to help the medium, it hurts.

I have a longer
explanation of that, but another way to
look at it is this. Conversations, including
business conversations, are two-way: both buyer and
seller ask for attention and provide information.
Real advertising is one-way, but the advertiser
is offering information and asking for attention.
That’s not just the information in the ad. The
ad’s existence, and the fact that it’s running
in a certain place, are valuable information about the
advertiser’s intentions.

But targeted advertising, like email spam,
telemarketing, and cold calling before it, is
one-sided. The selling side is both collecting and
using information and asking for attention. Humans
dislike cold calls so much that we have programmed
machines to avoid them, and now people are programming
spam filters and ad blockers to dodge them.

Houston is right about making better ads and getting
the web to work more like print, but there's still a
missing piece. If we really want to increase trust
in web advertising as a medium, we need to fix the
privacy bugs in browsers that make creepy targeting
possible, or at least get out of the way of people who
are fixing them. Real advertisers should be backing
the Cookie
Clearinghouse and similar privacy efforts.